WASHINGTON — The war in Iraq is forcing top Pentagon planners to rethink several key assumptions about the use of military power and has called into question the vision set out nearly four years ago that the armed forces can win wars and keep the peace with small numbers of fast-moving, lightly armed troops.
As the Pentagon begins a comprehensive review that will map the future of America's armed forces, many Defense Department officials are acknowledging that an intractable Iraqi insurgency they didn't foresee has undermined the military strategy.
In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon unveiled a new agenda that promised to prepare the military to fight smaller wars against terrorist networks and to swiftly defeat rogue states.
With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushing for a "lighter, more lethal and highly mobile fighting force," the Pentagon scrapped as outdated the requirement that the U.S. military be large enough to simultaneously fight two large-scale wars against massed enemy armies. And it spent little time worrying about how to keep the peace after the shooting stopped.
Something happened on the way to the wars of the future: The Pentagon became bogged down in an old-fashioned, costly and drawn-out war of occupation. Though the rapid assault on Baghdad in March 2003 went smoothly, it is the bloody two years since that have diverged from the Pentagon's blueprint.
"When people were thinking about regime change, they really weren't thinking about the long-term stabilization and peacekeeping operations. There was a view that in terms of gross numbers, [regime change operations] wouldn't last as long as Iraq has," said Rand Corp. fellow Andrew Hoehn, who led the Pentagon's last major review in 2001.
As the Pentagon begins its assessment, it has 145,000 troops stationed in a country they were supposed to have left months ago. And with tensions rising between Washington and the two other countries labeled by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil" -- Iran and North Korea -- there is a growing belief within the military's ranks that the White House's rhetoric about preemptive war is out of sync with the U.S. military's strained resources.
Some inside the Pentagon criticized senior Bush administration officials for assuming that the war in Iraq would end when U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein's regime -- and for assuming the U.S. could reduce its troop presence to 30,000 soldiers within six months of Baghdad's fall.
